War on homelessness an urgent battle

4:59 PM,
Feb. 6, 2014

Written by

DeWayne Wickham

Not long after the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter opened - and years before he had an inkling that another Harvard student of his generation would become president of the United States and name him to his Cabinet - Shaun Donovan became one the shelter's first volunteers. That was in 1983, when he was a college freshman who spent time in the shelter attending to the needs of some of the Boston area's most troubled people.

One night recently, as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Donovan walked the streets of a Washington, D.C., neighborhood searching for the homeless of the nation's ...